How to Stay On Budget & On Target with Geezeo

REVIEW: Geezeo.com - A funny name, but a seriously valuable service. Get your Geezeo on now!

On the Internet, there's often very little left to the imagination these days and even less of value to be found without a price, so finding a service that's both practical and free is always something worth writing about. For those who are religious about tracking their finances and sticking to a budget, or know they need to, Geezeo is a great place to help make educated financial decisions through a simple web-based interface.

In short, Geezeo is a money management platform designed to help individuals track their finances and budgets including income, expenses, debt, investments and more. Budget creation, tracking and reporting features help you visualize how well you are meeting your goals. And for those inclined to share their experiences, Web 2.0 community support features allow you to share your successes and your disappointments with others. And when you really commit a financial faux pas, feel free to ease your conscience in the Money Confessions message board!

Budgets: In addition to aggregating data from financial institutions, budgeting tools can automatically track individual checking and credit card transactions to create monthly budgeting reports. In a very simple and visual way, spending targets report whether you are meeting your budget (green) or are over your budget (red). This budgeting feature is perhaps the most valuable part of the service providing a one page summary view of how you are doing with your monthly expenses.

Goals: We are all encouraged to write down our goals, whether they are personal, professional, or financial. Geezeo gives you a place to write down your financial goals and tie these to actual accounts. Whether you are paying off a school loan, saving for a vacation, or investing for your retirement, now you have a place to hard code your goals and see how well you are meeting them.

Setting Up Your Account: Setting up your free Geezeo account veryis simple. Never the less, setting up all of your accounts, tagging checking and credit card transactions, and setting up budgets is likely to take at least a couple of hours. But once you have invested the time to set up your account, Geezeo runs pretty much on auto-pilot. Not only can you review automatically updated account balances and budgets at any time - you can even access the information via text messaging on your phone. Where else can you view all this data in one place at the literal touch of a button? For free? Exactly.

Shortcomings: As many good features as there are, Geezeo still has plenty of room for improvement. There have been reported problems in setting up accounts and for many, some of the transaction information is published in a counter-intuitive way. In some instances, functionality is entirely missing. And with all the work involved in listing financial assets and loan information, another nice feature would include corresponding assets so that a Balance Sheet could be generated as well.

Although some of the feature sets in Geezeo are not quite ready for prime-time, Geezeo is still a great tool for helping set and manage personal budgets. If you're tired of creating and managing your own spreadsheets, or if importing and managing data in Quicken or MS Money has become too cumbersome, then this may provide a simpler way to keep an eye on the traffic in and out of your wallet. Best of all, Geezeo will help you manage your budgets and finances all for a very nominal charge - for FREE!

If you have questions about the security of your personal financial information at Geezeo, be sure to CLICK HERE to read an interview with Geezeo Co-Founder, Peter Glyman who addresses this typical concern and provides some insight into how the service works behind the scenes. 

With a recent investment by TheStreet.com, you can look forward to seeing further development at Geezeo with expanded features and new services. Of course, competition is already on the way and in one case it comes in a Mint flavor! Come back soon for a review of another up-and-coming online money management service that promises to heat up the competition.